Parallel communication in a large distributed environment

The evolution of MultiRPC, a parallel remote procedure call mechanism implemented in Unix is described. Parallelism is obtained from the concurrency of processing on servers and from the overlapping of retransmissions and timeouts. Each of the parallel calls retains the semantics and functionality of the standard remote procedure calls. The underlying communication medium need not support multicast or broadcast transmissions. An analytic model of the system is derived and validated. The experimental observations demonstrate the feasibility of using MultiRPC to contact up to 100 servers in parallel.<
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